| 1 |
>>>>> On Tue, 29 Aug 2017, William Hubbs wrote: |
| 2 |
|
| 3 |
> the Gentoo Council will meet again on 2017-09-10 at 18:00 utc. |
| 4 |
> Please reply to this message with any items you would like us to discuss |
| 5 |
> or vote on. |
| 6 |
|
| 7 |
I request the Council to approve a PMS change, namely to ban empty |
| 8 |
dependency groups like "|| ( )" or "foo? ( )". |
| 9 |
|
| 10 |
Currently, any parenthesised groups in package dependency |
| 11 |
specifications [1] are permitted to contain zero items, and such empty |
| 12 |
groups evaluate to true. For logical disjuctions like "|| ( )" this |
| 13 |
deviates from the usual convention that empty operations should |
| 14 |
evaluate to false. |
| 15 |
|
| 16 |
As was recently discovered, Portage was changed in 2011 to treat empty |
| 17 |
dependency groups as an error. Apparently nobody has missed the |
| 18 |
feature for six years, and no ebuild (or eclass) in the Gentoo |
| 19 |
repository is using it. |
| 20 |
|
| 21 |
I see removing empty groups retroactively for all EAPIs (therefore |
| 22 |
tightening the rules for ebuilds) as the best path of action, because |
| 23 |
ebuilds cannot rely on proper package manager support for the feature. |
| 24 |
|
| 25 |
Proposed patch for PMS is in [2]. |
| 26 |
|
| 27 |
Ulrich |
| 28 |
|
| 29 |
|
| 30 |
[1] https://projects.gentoo.org/pms/6/pms.html#x1-780008.2 |
| 31 |
[2] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-pms/message/ace2912fbbc582a08067c02ce400fedb |
Archives